Jedi-fu: ColdFusion wrappers for SHARE

Ray Camden (aka Jedimaster) has published a first cut at some ColdFusion wrappers for SHARE, and blogged about it.

The SHARE team is pretty excited about this: its really cool to see someone take your fresh off the presses technology and do something with it.

Ray does mention the fact that the API supports folders, and the fact that those folders don’t show up in the SHARE UI. This is intentional – we’re trying to keep SHARE using the same sort of hierarchy model as Lightroom, iTunes, and so forth: a single flat namespace with collections (aka albums, aka playlists, etc.) that are simply links to files within the flat hierarchy.

We use folders as a way of storing things that aren’t actually user files: thumbnail images, Flash previews, etc. We don’t index files in subfolders for search, we exclude them from some metadata searches, and so forth. This means that if you do put files in subfolders, they aren’t fully participating in the SHARE system and the results may not be what you expected/desired in future versions of the software. We’re expecting to add a lot of mechanisms for user defined collections, tagging/keywords, and more in the future, and we may have some other way of specifying hierarchy as well (e.g., collections that contain collections). Bottom line: don’t put user documents in subfolders.